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Season 2 does do a TV version of the "Daredevil trussed up with one hand taped to a revolver with one shell" scene from early in Ennis's tenure. Between that and War Zone, I'd say that Ennis's Punisher is the definitive model at this point.
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Mar 21, 2016 20:05
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WickedHate posted:Ennis' Punisher did accidentally kill an innocent girl once when he drugged a bunch of people at a slaver's place and she fell face first into her soup. She didn't die and nothing in that sequence is meant to make you think she did.
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Mar 21, 2016 22:49
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That was why Ennis and Rucka's runs were well-liked, and why Edmundson's wasn't. Rucka's Frank is fundamentally broken and the narrative spends surprisingly little time with him; it's mostly about the effect he has and people around him reacting to him. Ennis's Frank is a particularly efficient serial killer. Neither are in any way laudable. It also isn't an accident that every arc in Ennis's MAX book is at least as much about the antagonists and supporting characters as it is about Frank himself. Edmundson, on the other hand, gave Frank a bizarre network of people who explicitly supported his endeavors, because he's a member of the Military Brotherhood or something, and thus his actions are Right and Just. There's a bizarre subtext in the Edmundson run that's all the more bizarre because Ennis repudiates it in the first arc of MAX.
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Mar 21, 2016 23:44
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Lurdiak posted:Ennis still turned Punisher into a nearly infallible badass in a way almost no one prior had. It was nice to see Jason Aaron actually show Frank stumbling. Not really. That's a poor reading of the text, which is your specialty. Ennis's Castle is a confident planner who mostly succeeds due to being up against people who are nowhere near his level, and via guerrilla tactics. This is explicitly laid out in the first arc. He's a former Marine and combat veteran using military-grade weapons; he's typically up against Mafia street soldiers with pistols. His usual opposition's complete lack of actual training is the basis for one of the most famous sequences in the entire volume, the "they put the sights on top for a reason" line. Frank is simply on a higher plane than the people he targets. Even so, Frank ends every arc of the MAX book heavily injured, and often only succeeds due to pure dumb luck. In "Up is Down & Black is White," he would've flat-out died if Kathryn O'Brien hadn't taken a hand; in "Kitchen Irish," he spends much of the last fight half-conscious in a raft after he's hit with a stun grenade, and the entire story more or less resolves without him. In "Widowmaker," he's barely a factor, and lies injured in bed for half the arc while Jenny takes care of business wearing his colors; Frank's role in the larger plot is as a symbol of the price of vengeance, and why it's not worth paying. Yeah, there are dozens of tiny toons who read Ennis's Punisher and simply see a gun-wielding, black-ops badass who mows down hundreds of story-coded criminals, but it's an incredibly selective reading that ignores broad swaths of the text. The overarching theme of Punisher MAX is "Being Frank Castle is loving awful."
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Mar 21, 2016 23:59
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bobkatt013 posted:Was that Rucka or waid? That book's attributed to both of them, as I recall. It reads more like a Waid joke to me. rkajdi posted:I think this is the big Punisher trade I read back when I first got back into comics in the 00s (Welcome Back Frank) and it's still fundamentally unreadable to me, if only because I understand that most of the people reading it are cheering Frank and miss the whole point. I'm also the wrong audience for Garth Ennis stuff I guess, though as time goes on he's way better than whatever kind of filth monsters Mark Millar or Alan Moore have turned into. Yeah, Ennis's Marvel Knights books are way more into the escapist fantasy angle than the later stuff, and I should've drawn that distinction. Marvel Knights, especially in "Welcome Back, Frank," is an attempt for Ennis to do a PG-13 version of the kind of comedy he'd become known for with Preacher, and I really don't think it lands. I suppose it helps for me, to some extent, that he primarily pursues organized crime and he was never rich, which dodges some of the unfortunate class-warfare subtext. That was much more present back in the '80s and '90s, I think, where guys like Mike Baron and Chuck Dixon would give him million-dollar "battle vans" to play with. Lurdiak posted:I don't know why you're unable to make your incorrect and surface-level point without taking a shot at me, you loving moron. Yeah, I could've not done that. That said, any interpretation of the MAX run where Frank is "infallible" is the kind of thing you can only really say if you haven't actually read the MAX run, or if you're interpreting "Frank always survives to the end of the arc" as infallibility. It's a critically indefensible position.
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Mar 22, 2016 01:17
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Lurdiak posted:Oh yeah, Frank getting physically hurt totally counteracts Garth Ennis' inability to write him as someone who's ever in the wrong about anything or is ever shown in a position of weakness. My view is "critically indefensible" because I notice things like Frank being immune to torture unlike everyone else in the narrative, or the people he goes up against being largely caricatures of humans beings who more often than not have some kind of sexual perversion to let us know that they're not 'manly' like Frank is. It really isn't. The last arc features a squad of Delta Force soldiers who underestimate Frank on their first encounter with him, and on the second, roundly defeat him, despite Frank's attempts to first bluff, then talk his way out. They handcuff him to a chair, and their commanding officer, Howe, gets curious enough about Frank that he independently investigates the claims Frank is making. Specifically, it's that the group of generals who Howe is working for are responsible for (summarized briefly) an act of terrorism for profit, and the entire operation to find and arrest Frank is in the name of killing Frank and destroying some evidence Frank's got. It's not the "right thing to do," as it was initially pitched to Howe; it's one hundred percent rear end-covering. It also comes out that Howe has history with Frank, which is why he volunteered for the mission of arresting Frank. When it becomes clear to Howe that turning Frank over to the generals would result in Frank's execution, and that the generals have all committed treason in the name of personal profit, he lets Frank go and walks away. If Howe had been able to guarantee Frank a trial, followed by prison, he would've kept Frank in custody. It's not that Frank's morally superior; that's more Edmundson's trip. It's that Howe owes Frank a favor from well back in the day, though Frank doesn't remember him, and that after verifying Frank's evidence, Howe is pretty sure that Frank being loose is a lesser stain on his conscience than letting the generals go. The entire arc consists of Frank in a position of weakness, where he's generally treated like a mad dog; at first, it's because he absolutely refuses to go lethal against American soldiers, and then, it's because he's handcuffed to a chair. It's an arc about various people trying to figure out how something like him gets created, and how and if it can be stopped; it starts a slight trend in Ennis's work in the period, where he examines the similarities between Vietnam and the then-current war in Iraq, hinting that that war could easily produce something as broken as Frank Castle. He's depicted as broken, alone, and used-up. It might be worth doing a Let's Read of the MAX run, actually, in the wake of the second season of "Daredevil." Ennis has really primed a lot of people to act as if his work's less nuanced than it sometimes is, and I think it does his more thoughtful stories--mostly the military fiction, although you can point to individual arcs or issues of some other stuff--a disservice. CharlestheHammer posted:People getting hurt doesn't actual matter if it doesn't actually effect how he does thing. It's just as uncritical as saying surviving means infallible. Frank spends half the "Widowmaker" arc lying in a bed, unable to do anything else, with multiple gunshot wounds. He also spends the denouement of "Kitchen Irish" lying in a dull heap because he takes a flashbang to the face. The dude bleeds a lot in MAX. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 02:09
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rkajdi posted:I mean, he's not taking down fraudulent investment bankers or tax cheats (which would also make for a bad story IMO) it's the standard low life mobsters. You might enjoy the "Barracuda" arc on Punisher MAX. It's Frank vs. a bunch of cocaine-addled power company executives.
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Mar 22, 2016 02:34
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rkajdi posted:Hmm... that's some violence I could I believe it was directly inspired by the California energy crisis, yeah. I don't have the issues on hand.
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Mar 22, 2016 02:45
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DrProsek posted:I haven't read BK or GoI, but Red Wolf just feels really disappointing. It's not an unholy abomination, but it's a really standard Western in modern day, and Red Wolf feels like a supporting character in his own book next to the two actual cops. As an attempt to reintroduce Red Wolf to the Marvel universe it fails to actually make him feel like a part of it, cornered off hin his own wacky small town policing adventure, and as a modern Western there's nothing really remarkable about it. It does seem like Edmundson's plot would be better-suited to a novel or something than a comic. It's on a very slow boil, and while things happen, it isn't making a very efficient use of the monthly format. There's also nothing about his initial plotline that requires it to also involve time travel, at least at this point. I also have to wonder how much of the book's lack of success can be attributed to the pushback against Edmundson himself.
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Mar 22, 2016 18:45
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bobkatt013 posted:Every single one of his gay characters are also problematic as they all seem to be sexual deviants He's been writing more "normal" gay relationships into his work since maybe 2004. For example, the "Streets of Laredo" arc in Marvel Knights Punisher features a decent, heroic gay character, and there's a whole arc in the last "Kev" book he did for Wildstorm about the main character coming to terms with his homophobia. Yeah, Preacher is skeevy like that, but he's done a lot since then. Skeematic posted:Ales Kot implied that he was homophobic last year, and said that he was going to release some info about it but i don't think he ever did. But I don't think there was anything else in terms of accusations about Edmondson. I started to write about it from memory, but as it turns out, here's a good collection of the accusations. http://www.theouthousers.com/index.php/news/133145-why-are-people-angry-at-nathan-edmondson-the-new-writer-of-marvels-red-wolf.html
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Mar 22, 2016 21:51
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I got the impression that dudes were trying to stay well clear of slander laws, but whatever it is, it's why Ales Kot doesn't work at Marvel anymore.
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Mar 23, 2016 07:32
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Yeah, I'm not saying it's a crying shame, but Kot's using it as one of his big reasons. He's probably better doing his own thing anyway; Material isn't bad.
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Mar 23, 2016 08:34
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Gaz-L posted:Only minor quibble I have is... are we supposed to know anything about America's girlfriend? Like, she talks like she knows Kate Bishop, so is she from Young Avengers? She was introduced in that anthology issue that teased all the various Avengers titles from a while back, as I recall. I remember the name of the short story ("The Opposite of Punching"), but not the actual book's name, for some reason.
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Mar 23, 2016 19:23
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Luchacabra posted:What does this mean? Is it some sort of meta-narrative about the so-called sliding timeline? It's a throughline going through Ewing's Marvel work at the moment, and which has shown up in Waid's Avengers. The problem that the Ultimates are presently investigating is the fragmented nature of time in the Marvel Universe, owing largely to multiple, reckless uses of time travel. Apparently they're going to do something about it which will affect the universe as a whole, effects of which are already manifesting.
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Mar 23, 2016 19:40
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DrProsek posted:
Unless he wins.
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Mar 23, 2016 20:35
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Loki running for president feels like it'd fill an arc or two at best, not an ongoing series.
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Teenage Fansub posted:Can Sienkiewicz's New Mutants issues be read by alone, or should I go through the first 17 issues first? It's under the Jim Shooter era, so there's a lot of exposition, and the characters involved are all still relatively young, but I'd read the first 17 issues first. You'd probably get more out of it that way.
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Mar 28, 2016 11:05
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I'd include the old '80s Doctor Strange story where he kills off Dracula and all other vampires, although I don't have issue numbers handy.
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Apr 13, 2016 07:38
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It's not bad, but Aaron's pretty much recycling the first arc in Thor: God of Thunder.
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Apr 14, 2016 00:29
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I read Thanos: The Infinity Finale last night, and I've been thinking: it's strange that Gladiator, for as powerful as he is and as dangerous as he's occasionally depicted as being, has become the cosmic jobber of the Marvel Universe. Off the top of my head, he's got a couple of unequivocal wins (beating up Colossus in the Phoenix Saga, and he did all right in the War of Kings arc), but since then he gets worked pretty regularly: * Beaten up by the X-Men and Starjammers off-panel in one of Claremont's last issues of Uncanny * Knocked out in one panel by Gambit in the issue after that * Cut in half by an evil Silver Surfer in Exiles * Gets soloed by Cannonball in Scott Lobdell's run on Uncanny * Sacrifices himself (and gets better) at one point in Walter Simonson's run on Fantastic Four * In Infinity Finale, he's the first one killed by an orbital strike from Annihilus * In Infinity Revelation, Thanos teleports him two hundred light-years away rather than bother fighting him * The Phoenix Five takes him out in Wolverine & The X-Men
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Apr 15, 2016 23:05
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Ignoring these slights to Chicago pizza that hooligans insist upon strewing about an otherwise clean thread, I have to figure that Doom, being a European snob, only eats Neapolitan-style pizza with all the authenticated ingredients: Campana mozzarella, San Marzano tomatoes, etc. Either that or there's a specific Latverian version, concocted during Doom's brief experimentation with molecular gastronomy.
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Apr 17, 2016 02:48
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Gaz-L posted:I'm not crazy, by the way, right? The end of this week's New Avengers was a deliberate shout-out to Jay & Miles (of Xplaining the X-Men fame), right? They're certainly the people who are leaning on the joke right now, and it wouldn't surprise me if Ewing had it on his mind after guesting on their show a couple of times, but Sam did spend the '80s saying exactly that.
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Apr 21, 2016 02:51
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That's random. I know he's got a couple of fans, but nobody's really done anything with him for a while. Are they just trying to set up a new cosmic book since Sean Ryan's Nova isn't doing well?
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Apr 26, 2016 21:14
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Is it wrong that I kinda want it to be a black female queer agender handicapped Quasar, just to see some of the usual suspects combust with rage?
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Apr 26, 2016 22:37
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I was thinking the other day that Avril Kincaid got a little too much of an introduction, but assumed she was going to be supporting cast going forward in the Thunderbolts series or something.
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Apr 26, 2016 23:12
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Edge & Christian posted:Legacy characters and representation are cool and all, but this entire book felt like the most 'moving things around because someone asked us to and we can't be bothered to come up with a good story around the moves' thing ever. It does seem like something they tossed in at the last second, doesn't it. I don't have a problem with the idea on the face of it, but most of this Quasar thing is stuff that could and should have been built up to, rather than popping up out of nowhere in a single issue.
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Apr 27, 2016 18:31
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After reading today's Ultimates, I don't think Hickman's necessarily the best comparison. Ewing's certainly taking off from his recently-established cosmology, but the sheer scope of it is reminding me more of something like really old-school 1970s Dr. Strange and Defenders stories, with Englehart and Gerber and early Jim Starlin.
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Apr 27, 2016 21:14
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It's almost exactly Superior Foes Nick Spencer.
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Apr 30, 2016 00:38
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That was easily one of my favorite parts of the crossover: Earth-65 Reed not requiring any convincing whatsoever, because he's a Reed Richards and this crap happens all the time to him. Also, this artist Bengal on the Spider-Gwen issues is really solid.
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May 6, 2016 03:24
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I like how she's some kind of one-woman Avengers continuity vortex. Also, for those who might not have heard, Disney is officially out of the first-party video game business and has shuttered Disney Interactive. Future Marvel games will likely be licensed out to third parties. We're closer to a Marvel vs. Capcom 4 than we've been for some time.
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May 11, 2016 21:14
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He showed up on the last page of the last arc in Jane's book, having been imprisoned by an unknown group for what must be a fair bit of time.
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May 13, 2016 17:35
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Gaz-L posted:The Squirrel Girl OGN and YA novel that Marvel are pushing forward with would certainly imply that book does significant numbers digitally or in trade. I doubt they'd put resources into that kind of thing if the title was a lame duck. I believe Axel Alonso has said that Squirrel Girl's sales in trade are what keep the floppies going.
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May 18, 2016 19:44
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Re: today's issue of Wolverine, what the hell is "twenty-five with chicken"? I have never encountered such a noodle dish.
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May 19, 2016 02:02
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Since Maria also knew the "all the flavor of twenty-five" line, I wondered if it might be some New York foodie joke I wasn't privy to.
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May 19, 2016 03:03
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I was just thinking that Cap seemed a little more of a dick than usual in the couple of issues that have come out since he got re-powered, and the Red Skull was right there at the time, seemingly doing nothing.
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May 24, 2016 20:40
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Now that I've read the issue of Captain America in question, it seems pretty damned obvious. The Red Skull was in Pleasant Hill, and took the opportunity to tweak Steve's memories for him, retroactively inserting an entire chapter of his life as a kid where he met and admired a HYDRA agent. Which is extra weird, because she hands him something with the modern HYDRA logo, which wouldn't exist for decades yet.
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May 25, 2016 18:09
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After reading this week's Ms. Marvel, I want a Skyshark and Lightning Golems team-up story.
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May 25, 2016 18:34
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Note in the flashback pages where Steve meets "Elisa Sinclair," they're colored in muted grays and blues except for Elisa, who's always wearing bright red. The Red Skull was also right there on the scene when Steve fought Crossbones in the Pleasant Hill crossover. Hell, the advantage of Kobik is that she's a sentient Cosmic Cube, so he could've easily made suggestions to her while she was rejuvenating Steve.
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May 25, 2016 19:07
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Thus, by a process of association, we can safely conclude that HYDRA is responsible for Steve Guttenberg's career. It checks out.
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May 25, 2016 20:10
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I get the feeling that a lot of people are just reading a few out-of-context panels, rather than the full issue or the handful of relevant issues that came before it.
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May 25, 2016 22:02
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Gaz-L posted:I'm not reading either Cap book, but was Steve's de-aging implied to be separate from the rest of the Avengers getting their powers/gear back? Because in Avengers it looked like Deadpool talked to Kobik for like a minute, and she fixed everyone, so I'm not sure when Skull or Zemo or Sin or whoever would've been able to get to her? The Skull still has Professor Xavier's telepathy kitbashed into his head, and he was standing right outside the bowling alley while Steve fought Crossbones. He wouldn't have needed to be anywhere near Kobik to influence her, or for that matter, anywhere near Steve.
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May 25, 2016 23:31
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