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Ryan North has a huge fanbase, and I'd guess that a lot of that fanbase are way more likely to buy a comic on the internet than at a store.
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May 18, 2016 15:23
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I haven't seen the comic, but if you mean the name, Chinese restaurant menus sometimes assign everything a number for ease of ordering.
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May 19, 2016 02:04
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The bit with the Sentinel is just a great punchline. Squirrel Girl is really something special.
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May 29, 2016 17:21
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I thought Captain Marvel's series during Civil War 2 was pretty fun but The Mighty Captain Marvel is terrible, yeesh. Packed full of loose plotting, unearned hokey sentimentality, and pop culture references. It's a shame because I totally buy the character as a tentpole hero for the Marvel universe now, but she needs a better book.
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Aug 18, 2017 18:11
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Riri's tenure in Invincible Iron Man has been some of the best comics I've read in a while, and I hope she sticks around in the role for a bit. It's smart, interesting superhero writing that is way better in practise than the premise of "teen genius with no previous involvement in the universe takes over as Iron Man" sounds like it's going to be.
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Aug 29, 2017 12:28
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There's an implication that the Captain America we follow has only ever been an ideal created by a cosmic cube, first by the allies to win WW2, and now again by Kobik. Hydra Cap is the "original" historical Cap. At least, it's possible to read it that way.
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Aug 30, 2017 19:13
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Blockhouse posted:It is if you ignore the context of that whole thing being a huge lie part of HydraCap's backstory I only read Secret Empire, none of the tie-ins, but it's never actually called out as a lie in that by someone with authority. So I could be totally wrong, just it's not in the main book.
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Aug 30, 2017 19:16
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Secret Empire was silly but it was a lot more readable than Civil War 2, at least. Also the art was nice. Also the adventure with Pym-Ultron was genuinely great comics. On the whole though still kind of a mess.
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Aug 31, 2017 18:17
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Edge of Venomverse was great and had lovely art even in the slower stories, but Venomverse proper seems like a drag and all the cool characters from Edge either don't appear or get one off-voice line. A shame.
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Sep 7, 2017 15:55
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It was really good. Has a lot to say about consumption of fiction and the value of escapism/fictional characters. Gwenpool has really come massive strides from where it started, and it's one of my favourite comics right now.
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Sep 14, 2017 13:09
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X-O posted:I’ve heard nothing but bad things about the America book even from massive fans of the character. Apparently the writer is just no good. It’s her first time writing a comic and sometimes that works out but apparently not in this case. The art is gorgeous, I love the character, and the book is a mess with disastrous pacing and plotting. It's a terrible shame because it really could have been a knockout title.
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Sep 19, 2017 14:20
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Like, even basic continuity is off. Probably the most egregious example is a scene in an early issue where America travels back in time to the American line of battle in WW2 Germany and meets Captain America and Peggy Carter, and then suddenly Hitler is standing in the middle of no man's land with some German soldiers and America punches Hitler. It's not played as a surreal moment really at all, and Hitler disappears from the scene immediately after being punched and then apparently America and Peggy are being chased by nazis and they have to hide in an underground bunker. It feels like maybe the writer didn't communicate adequately to the artist what was supposed to be going on, because none of it makes sense as it appears on the page.
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Sep 19, 2017 14:46
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site posted:After everything ive heard about the tantrums he throws, having to kill his own twitter cuz he raged at people online so often, his garbage fire of a book champions (lol microagressions, punching nazis who firebomb a mosque is wrong, concentration camps are actually good) and nonchalantly having a nonconsenting sexual encounter between vision and wanda in avengers i am unwilling to give waid any benefit of the doubt that hes not just covering his own rear end Where did the Vision and Wanda thing happen? Genuinely curious, I always loved them together and this would be sad.
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Sep 26, 2017 18:18
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The Civil War 2 era run on Captain Marvel was pretty good, but the current run is an abominable mess of pop culture references and bad pacing. She's a good character, but she rarely seems to be written very well. Mighty Thor on the other hand is my favourite superhero comic being produced today. It's an excellent story with a great protagonist, a compelling overarching plot, and fun superheroics beat to beat. The issues where Thor competes in a Challenge of the Gods against the Shi'ar gods are beyond just "great comics being published right now", they're some great all-time comics. Android Blues fucked around with this message at 11:06 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 09:44
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Jane Foster is so, so good as Thor. More to the point Jason Aaron is a great storyteller that's great at telling stories about her. Some of the Mighty Thor stuff is all-time greats that people will still be looking back on fondly years from now, I think.
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Oct 19, 2017 08:52
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Rhyno posted:Jason Aaron is on his way to unseating Walt Simonson as the best Thor writer ever in my humble opinion. His stories are both fun superhero romps and rich mythology-building setting work. It's just so good. Almost everything works.
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Oct 19, 2017 18:03
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Anime_Otaku posted:Wilson seems to be the only person that can really write Kamala as anything but overbearing. I don’t hate her in Champions or Secret Warriors but it’s definitely not as good. Champions even has her call out, "ugh, you're not making me fall into the role of boring nag just because I'm a girl!" but it still kinda manages to make her do it. Champions isn't great. And it's ludicrously, ridiculously slowly paced.
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Oct 19, 2017 22:36
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Riri is really good and Bendis has done an amazing job with her, so I hope the character sticks around and whoever gets her next doesn't fumble the catch.
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Nov 9, 2017 12:27
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irlZaphod posted:So how was the first Waid/Samnee issue of Cap? There's only been one or two impressions posted so far. I liked it. Just a pretty good, wholesome story about Captain America saying no to hate.
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Nov 9, 2017 14:13
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twistedmentat posted:Except Storms, that silver bodysuit is inferior to her black or punk outfits. All of Storm's classic costumes are good. She's the queen of style. Mohawk Storm is ultimate level though.
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Nov 10, 2017 12:46
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Onmi posted:I think the compressed story telling would work. Like he said, Chris Claremont has ongoing plots in X-Men, but he made sure that when people brought an issue, they got a story. This is one of the best things about reading the Claremont run and you sorely miss it when you go back to modern comics. He does have arcs that run on and loads of continuity, but almost every issue is a good single issue story that a reader who's never heard of the X-Men can pick up, understand, and enjoy. I'm a big believer in that style. For my money, in modern comics Jason Aaron is maybe the best I've seen at telling fun, approachable single issue stories within the context of an ongoing plot, and not falling victim to decompressed, "well, this issue is just set-up for the next two issues!" storytelling.
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Nov 24, 2017 14:14
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Guy Goodbody posted:Ben Reilly is back? How is Ben Reilly back? There was an arc in Spider-Man where the Jackal returned and was cloning people, and turned out to be a clone of Ben Reilly driven MAD and EVIL! by years of torture. He has his own solo title now where he's basically Deadpool Spider-Man doing wacky crazy anti-hero things.
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Dec 6, 2017 13:04
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Riri is really good and has what feels like a classic superhero backstory played competently and straight. I like the Ironheart issues of Invincible Iron Man a lot.
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Dec 17, 2017 15:38
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Most importantly I think, she's written like a comic book genius, but not in that snarky, "I'm super smart and sarcastic and quippy," way where being a genius is just a trait they have like someone on CSI being a hacker. She actually comes off as a little out of step with the people around her and troubled by the way her intelligence makes her stand out. She's a good character.
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Dec 17, 2017 15:40
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For what it's worth I thought Black Panther and the Crew was terribly paced and erratically plotted. Five issues to introduce the primary cast one by one and then the plot abruptly resolving in the sixth issue is extremely wonky decompression. I haven't read any of Coates' other comic work, but it felt like a swing and a miss from him. Also didn't have Storm's voice down at all, despite her featuring heavily.
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Dec 22, 2017 22:37
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I love Jane Foster Thor and think she's the best iconic Marvel character going currently, but separating Jane from Thor and having Thor continue as her own character would totally destroy a lot of what makes her compelling. Her whole heroic pathos is that she's a mortal among gods, burning away the limited time that remains to her to protect them, and that despite her human frailty and limited mortal perspective she's wiser and more courageous than the petty, feuding gods she deals with. I wouldn't be averse to dodging the Sword of Damocles and having her escape death. I'd love to see more Jane Thor pretty much in perpetuity, I think she has the stuff of an all-time great comics hero. You just kinda worry that she might end up shunted off to the side and atrophying if she and a worthy Odinson have to share the spotlight.
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Jan 4, 2018 21:54
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Sentinel Red posted:Yeah, I'm with you. More than anything in the run so far, I find the Shi'ar-Asgard war to be crucial in defining her journey and reason for being. An important event that lead to her getting Mjolnir was that Thor agreed with Gor that gods were unecessary and unworthy of those who worship them. Now you've got an ordinary mortal woman who, despite the terrible cost to herself, steps up and becomes an example to all gods and becomes beloved through the realms for her kindness and decency and willingness to put people first. When those Shi'ar fucks were bringing down calamaties on their own people to show off who's got the biggest god dick, she didn't try and outdo them, she saved the people from the consequnces. There's a whole bunch of Shi'ar who ain't praying to their gods anymore, they're praying to Jane. Them and countless others throughout the nine realms. Yeah, that's one of her crowning moments for me too. I really think the issue where she saves the Shi'ar from various calamities rather than engaging in the Challenge of the Gods is an all-time classic because of the power of those moments you describe and how strongly they speak to her character. It expresses perfectly that she's a powerful, compassionate, iconic hero, and it's her mortal flaws and vulnerabilities that are the axis of her courage and compassion. It reminds me a lot of best parts of All-Star Superman.
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Jan 5, 2018 01:03
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pubic works project posted:So I just read Civil War II. God drat that was a piece of poo poo and I really hate Carol now. She was written so god drat poor. Her solo series during the Civil War 2 status quo is actually a weirdly good piece of apologia for her stance, so much so that it totally clashes with how she's portrayed as a predictive fascist in other books.
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Jan 6, 2018 18:52
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Skwirl posted:I'm the one person who liked the Brian Reed series, and I liked her hanging out with the X-Men under Claremont. Claremont's Carol was always good. I cannot stand the Brian Reed stuff though. Was it him who did the supremely creepy and terrible arc where the Puppet Master turns a bunch of female superheroes into sex slaves? Because that's one of the worst comics I've ever read.
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Jan 24, 2018 11:53
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Jesus, I looked it up (it was in Brian Reed's run) and I forgot that one of the heroes he has get captured, shipped to Chile, and turned into a living sex doll is Cassie Lang. Also Tigra. What did Tigra ever do to you, Brian Reed? Seriously one of the worst things ever. It's absolutely astonishing what used to be considered acceptable in comics in the 2000s.
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Jan 24, 2018 12:15
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Reed even gave the Puppet Master a new power (a higher grade of magic clay that let him control people with a greater degree of precision) explicitly so that he could use the women as slave prostitutes. It's one of those comics arcs you can hardly think about without becoming both nauseated and angry.
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Jan 24, 2018 14:29
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Jordan7hm posted:It’s the problem with mind control powers and “real world” logic. Evil people with mind control powers would obviously use them for rapey sex stuff. I think even assuming you want to be "realistic" about it, what's extra disgusting about the story is that this isn't an evil scheme the Puppet Master is planning to enact, which Carol then stops before anything too awful happens. Rather, it's been going on for months when the story begins, and Carol only stumbles on his rape compound after he kidnaps Arana and she follows up on the disappearance. What's more, the character never had powers like that until this story introduced them. Previously, he was always only capable of vague commands - "go here, fight this person," that kind of thing. To facilitate his creepy teenager rape story, Reed writes in a new powerset for this Lee and Kirby-era character that allows him fine motor control over his puppets so that, and this is explicit in the story, he can make his victims perform specific sex acts on clientele. It's all very much elective on the part of the writer. It feels like a super gross pervy fantasy about subjugating lady superheroes.
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Jan 24, 2018 17:36
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I don't think there's even anything wrong with having sexually menacing villains in comics, Alias is fairly good (and its TV adaptation is utterly fantastic), but that story in particular radiates skeevy exploitation and seems to lowkey loathe women. There's a right way to do it.
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Jan 24, 2018 17:49
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Guavatin posted:So I've got a question. Is it a good idea to stick with certain writers per comics? I'm thinking of going full Jason Aaron (currently reading his hulk run) and I'm loving it. I think so. It's good to give new books chances sometimes, but the skill of the writer tends to be more important than the characters they're writing. Aaron is a great example of a prolific and skilful writer who can make you care about anyone in comics.
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Feb 5, 2018 12:55
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Lurdiak posted:That's the issue with what I'll call Byrneian essentialism. Returning a character to their Original Roots(tm) is often more shocking and distasteful to readers than keeping them as they're commonly known, even if the progression they've had over the years papers over some distasteful things. Morrison obviously found it offensive that a character who was so evil when he was little was treated as a nuanced character who stands in for real life civil rights figures, but I'd argue it's much more offensive to people who grew up reading Claremont to say that all the nuance doesn't count because he's a terrorist and a baddie, and baddies don't get to also be heroes. Even though lots of terrorists are considered heroes in real life throughout history, because the world is very complex. Super agree with this. I like Morrison's New X-Men but writing Magneto as a mad old fascist bastard who is not only a genocidal dictator, but a really incompetent genocidal dictator with a drug habit, comes off like a moderately bitter move. Like, he's literally marching humans into Nazi-style ovens, and whining at his minions about everything, and then occasionally doing hits of Kick, and it comes off more like a character assassination than anything. Claremont's Magneto was the point where the character started having resonance, started mattering. Before Claremont wrote him, Magneto was the cookie cutter antagonist for a failed book that hadn't had a new issue printed in five years. So it feels a little hypocritical to take this character who is only a major and important and beloved part of X-Men canon because Claremont revamped him into a sympathetic Jewish Holocaust survivor attempting to prevent suffering through misguided authoritarianism, and go, "no, he's actually a Nazi terrorist dictator because that was how he was before he mattered or anyone really cared about him!". Like, the only reason anyone cares about this scorching take is because Claremont's nuanced portrayal made Magneto a popular character in the first place.
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Feb 5, 2018 13:04
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I guess the out there is that Magneto's Kick addiction means that he, like Quentin Quire, was technically being controlled by a sentient evil bacteria from the dawn of time, because Morrison.
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Feb 5, 2018 13:18
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That's really interesting. It feels like one of the most jarring things in an otherwise pretty great run, so I'd be interested to hear Morrison's take on it now.
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Feb 5, 2018 16:27
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I do agree with the horrible propensity of a lot of post-Claremont X-Men stories to be increasingly distorted rehashes, and I really like that New X-Men tries to advance the timeline a little bit and ask new questions. Claremont's run was so good because it asked new questions, because it introduced the dark alternate futures and brooding anti-heroes with mysterious pasts and heightened mutants being under existential threat to something more psychologically believable. A lot of later runs have just repeated those ideas rather than recognising that part of why they worked so well was because they were exciting ways to take the characters in new directions, advance the X-Men's timeline, and grow the world. That's a good point about it existing in the context of years of terrible Magneto stories from the 90s, as well. If you go straight from Claremont to Morrison, it reads like a smack in the face, but it is fair to say he was responding to more than just Claremont. Although, of course, Morrison's run does conclude with a dark alternate future story which I think may be one of its weakest parts. "A sentient evil bacteria was controlling Beast and also orchestrated most of the bad stuff in the entire run" isn't a great lynchpin for the final arc to turn around, or at least it didn't work well for me.
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Feb 5, 2018 17:02
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It depends on what you think of as defining canon for the X-Men. For some, Claremont's Magneto is the definitive version, and his revamp of the character is when Magneto as we now know him really began to take shape. I think it's fair to say that the Lee and Kirby Magneto is striking, but he isn't deep. He's a generic archvillain to pit this superhero team against, a sort of Y-Man to their X-Men. With how vital his Holocaust survivor background is to modern portrayals - something Claremont introduced from whole cloth and lovingly developed issue by issue - I think it would be fair to say his version of Magneto is pretty foundational, arguably more so than Lee and Kirby's. If you strip away the things Claremont added, Magneto's tragedy, his humanity, his struggle with his jaded outlook on the value of human life, you're not left with much of a character. Post-Claremont, Magneto definitely gets a lot more evil, but he still is never so outright monstrous as he is in Morrison's New X-Men. There's never a moment where he is marching humans into furnaces directly cribbed from Auschwitz, doing a tonne of drugs, killing children who are on his side, and babbling about how he will need to leave a few humans alive so they can toil as slaves doing undesirable jobs. It's a huge reversal even from the x-treme 90s version of the character.
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Feb 5, 2018 17:30
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The early Fabian Cortez stuff is really clunky because it's literally just like Some Assholes show up at Asteroid M where Magneto is in miserable seclusion and are like, "hey, we love you Magneto, let's take vengeance on the humans together," and Magneto is like, eh, uh, I dunno, and then Cortez just does it anyway and the X-Men blame Magneto and Magneto is like How Dare You, I Will Be Evil Now. It's a really circuitous way to get him working in opposition to the X-Men again after a decade of being either a neutral party, or their ally.
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Feb 5, 2018 22:29
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